Wednesday at OSCON

Wednesday at OSCON we kicked off the morning with the opening plenaries. David Eaves' talk inspired me to attend his longer session later in the day - Open Source 2.0 - The Science of Community Management. It was packed - in fact the most crowded session I've ever seen here. People sharing chairs, sitting on every available spot on the floor, leaning up against the back wall and the doors. Tori did a great writeup of the session, so I won't rehash, but if you haven't, you should read it [2]- What does this have to do with the Java Community? Everything. Java's strength is the community just as much as the technology, and individual project communities are so important to making a project successful and robust.

Another highlight for me was Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg's exploration of Java 8 technology. These guys are all over OSCON this week, and are great supporters and members of this community, between their Adopt the JDK and Adopt a JSR programs they have recently launched, the publication of their new book The Well Grounded Developer[3], on top of the London Jug they work with. They clearly have a lot to say, and are saying things a lot of us need to hear.

This talk was specifically about what the community can do to support the development of JDK8. They pointed out that there is a specific milestone in February 2013 which is where we'll need a lot of community testing and bug fixing. To that end they've created a project called Fix8on at github[4], which will only run on Java 8, and is intended to support deep testing of Java 8. It's intended to be fixed and broken in parallel with Java 8 and provide bugs and feedback for the developers.

I also saw great talks from Arun Gupta on developing for the cloud using EE7 and Meghan Gill of MongoDB on scaling up a growing community.